MADRID — The results of last week’s regional elections in Catalonia aren’t what they seem.

The victory of the region’s conservative president, Artur Mas, was pyrrhic. His party did retain a majority in the Catalan Parliament, but it lost 12 seats in the process, leaving it without the absolute majority Mas envisioned in September when he called for early elections.

Yet if Mas himself got burned, the cause he peddled on the campaign trail surged: the case for Catalonia’s independence was the election’s clear winner. Of the 135 legislators in the Catalan Generalitat, 107 included in their political platforms the “right to decide,” a euphemism for calling a referendum on whether the region should eventually secede from Spain. The nationalist party Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, which has doubled its seats in the Parliament, will now lead the opposition, and is likely to find common cause with Mas on the issue.
This outcome ought to make the central government in Madrid adopt a more conciliatory tone on a regional referendum. But independence remains very unlikely, and so the issue is becoming a distraction. Meanwhile, all the deafening headlines about it have drowned out the conversation that politicians should be having about how to make Spain more equitable at the regional level.

The country’s 17 autonomous regions do not have equal responsibilities. Catalonia enjoys more privileges than many, but only the Basque country and Navarre get to collect and administer their own taxes. These differences are the result of a series of ad hoc arrangements — known as café para todos (coffee for everybody) — that the central government and the different regions made in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Back then, Spain was emerging from nearly four decades of dictatorship and regional support was critical for the country’s fledgling democratic consensus.

At first the central government intended to grant wide-ranging prerogatives to three historically recognized nationalities: Catalonia, the Basque country and Galicia. But when other regions also clamored for special treatment, the government caved, creating an inconsistent array of concessions.

One of the most contentious issues today is the disparity in regional budgets. In the United States, citizens pay state and federal taxes, which means that at least some of the money goes directly from them to state governments. Not so in Spain, even though here “social expenditures are highly decentralized,” said Joan Costa-i-Font, a senior lecturer in political economy at the London School of Economics.

The regions of Spain depend almost entirely on revenue from the central government. This means that in good times regional governments are often heedless of the political consequences of running high debts, according to Jorge Galindo Alfonso, one of the authors of a report on the subject. And in bad times wealthy regions like Catalonia cry foul over the fiscal deficits that result from their giving more money to the central government than they get in return in the form of public investment.

Some 80 percent of Catalans feel they hand over too much to the central government in taxes. In fact, Greater Madrid and the Balearic Islands have higher fiscal deficits than Catalonia. That the people of those regions aren’t outraged like Catalans is evidence that nationalism backlights these issues on the Catalan stage.

Ever since 1980, some nominal feint toward independence has been the sine qua non of political viability in Catalonia. Central governments in Madrid, by turns bullish and half-heartedly conciliatory, have made matters worse.

Technical fixes would hardly quell Catalan disgruntlement, which runs much deeper. But they would at least level the uneven terrain that underlies debates about scattershot regional privileges. This is the idea behind what some have called Autonomy 2.0.

The Socialists came closest to discussing the nuts-and-bolts of this idea ahead of the Catalan elections — and they suffered the worst defeat of all. That’s partly because they have a checkered history of opportunism in Catalonia. But mostly, with this election overwhelmingly cast as a choice for or against independence, they struggled to stake out a middle position. Reforming the structure of government hardly squares with the poetry of campaign slogans.